Editor's Note: There's no better way to express the greatness of Nelson Mandela than to illustrate the turmoil out from which he dragged his country—and the unseemly and dangerous measures the South African people went through to elect him. This is an abridged excerpt from a story by Daniel Voll in the August 1994 edition of Esquire. He followed around a white militant group hellbent on making sure the first fair and free election in South Africa would never happen. It did anyway, Mandela won, and at the end he gave his inaugural speech in Afrikaans, the language of his former oppressor.

It's the oldest rule of hunting—if you wait at his watering hole, the lion will come to you. The rumor is that Eugene Terre Blanche, leader of the Afrikaner Resistance Movement, the largest white militant organization in South Africa, is on the run. At dawn, a police antiterrorist unit arrested thirty-two of his right-wing soldiers, charging them with 21 counts of murder and 139 counts of attempted murder, along with possession of explosives and illegal weapons. It is Wednesday of election week in South Africa, and a miracle seems to be happening. Factions that had promised bloody war here, even Chief Buthelezi and his Zulu warlords, have called a truce—at least temporarily—to elect a black president. All except white diehards like Terre Blanche, who is boycotting the elections and promising to disrupt the new democracy, using "any means necessary."

Not so long after the sun sets, Terre Blanche walks into the pub at the Ventersdorp Hotel, a beer-drenched lair of brownshirts and armed right-wing misfits in South Africa's rural platteland, about one hundred miles outside Johannesburg. Frans, the bartender, and the regulars stop playing darts and greet the Leader, hands clasping forearms, as is the custom in these parts. A burly oke in his fifties, white beard neatly trimmed, camouflage cap pulled low, Terre Blanche does not look like the most dangerous man in South Africa. No gun visible, just a screwdriver sticking out a side pocket of his work pants. He ducks into the gents, returns, spots me before he sits at the bar.

"Hello, cowboy," he says, ordering a whiskey for us both.

His blue, usually ardent eyes ("They burn with a pure flame of my people's desire for a white homeland") are now bloodshot; and his voice, a rumbling, gravel-pit-deep baritone, has quieted to a whisper. We talk about the raids on his organization, which, in his native Afrikaans, is called the Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging, or AWB. He says among the arrested are Nico Prinsloo, his right-hand man and secretary general, and the leader of the Iron Guards, his elite paramilitary unit. His fist slams the bar. "The bastards!"

Yes, he expects to be arrested, but no use running. "I've just come from my farm, where I told my black workers that I may be gone for a long time. I told them to feed the sheep and the cattle."

"And your horses?" (Terre Blanche—French for White Earth—was once a playwright, and I know my part in this drama: I am the writer who seeks his confession, and like him, I will play my part shamelessly.)

"Ja, I said goodbye to my horses." He downs his drink, buries his face in his huge hands. ("He's got such fokken big hands," one of his enemies marveled." I mean, you should see those hands. Big as fokken lavatory seats.") His fingernails are caked with dirt. "I am a lonely man," he says, "a simple man, a Boer farmer."

Four major bombs have gone off in the days before the elections, including a car bomb in downtown Johannesburg, which killed nine; another at a taxi rank, killing eleven; and a blast at Jan Smuts airport, which caused ten million dollars in damage. Now that his men have been arrested, will his organization, which claims to be the IRA of South Africa, take responsibility for the bombs? There have been deaths, I say, and people want to know if you were part of those deaths.

Frans's young daughter runs across the bar, wanting to be kissed by the Leader. For a beguiling moment, Terre Blanche is indeed Santa Claus, lifting her high into the air and then she is gone, scampering across the room. He turns to me, his voice somber. "What will her future be like under a black government? We taught them what was gold, we taught them what was diamonds, we taught them what was trains—and now they will kick us in the face. They will burn our flag and throw our books into the streets."

I tell him he looks tired.

"I hardly sleep at night, he says, lighting another cigarette. "When I close my eyes, I dream of betrayals."

For Terre Blanche, who has cast himself as military savior of Afrikaner nationalism, these are indeed trying times. I understand the desire for a few stiff drinks. Not only were his top generals locked up—perhaps for life—but, even worse, today the enemy breached Ventersdorp, his hometown. Right around the corner from his bunkered headquarters, where he's spent the last years declaring that a black government will never rule his people, local black voters—protected by the army and the police—cast their votes in South Africa's first democratic elections.

Most of South Africa's 5 million whites, including the vast majority of the 2.7 million law-abiding Afrikaners, believed former president P.W. Botha when he said that they must "adapt or die." In a whites-only referendum two years ago, more than 65 percent voted for a measure that started the country toward this week's all-race elections. And now, the AWB, which claims sixty thousand dues-paying members—with a hard core of armed, racist soldiers—finds itself on the other end of the gun and the legal system.

Clearly, the apartheid system, designed to remove South Africa's thirty million blacks to bleak tribal "homelands," had not worked. Millions of blacks, flouting apartheid's pass laws, had poured into the sprawling megatownship of Soweto, outside Johannesburg, and into squatter camps around Cape Town rather than live in the homelands. And the South African economy desperately needed the workers. When Botha's successor, F.W. de Klerk, also an Afrikaner, brought African National Congress leader Nelson Mandela out of prison in 1990 and began negotiations for a democratic election, he irrevocably split the Afrikaner tribe.

Right-wing ideologues like Terre Blanche, unwilling to give up apartheid's central belief in separateness, hit upon the idea of a volkstaat, a separate Afrikaner homeland within South Africa. The volkstaat, in Terre Blanche's fondest hopes, would include roughly the territories of the old Boer republic—parts of Orange Free State, the Western Transvaal, and northern Natal, with Richard's Bay as its port. It is the land of their forefathers, the white tribe of Africa, who arrived from Germany, France, and Holland in the 1600s. Land they fought and died for in battles against the Zulu and Xhosa tribes and finally the British. This is a sizable chunk of South Africa, roughly 20 percent of the country. "Our own little Israel," championed former defense minister General Constand Viljoen: He had a military plan for how the volkstaat could be accomplished. It was a boon for Terre Blanche, a former policeman who wanted the world finally to see that he was no neo-Nazi, but a patriot, one of those Afrikaners who wasn't so citified that he'd lost his roots.

And at root, Terre Blanche reckons, the true Afrikaner is a Boer, a man of the Earth, a farmer; the rest, such as de Klerk, are traitors who betrayed the volk to the CIA, the Jews, and Jane Fonda. Others might choose the ballot to decide their fate in a country where blacks outnumber whites six to one, but Terre Blanche didn't like those odds. He roared that the election would never take place. The borders of his people's volkstaat would be drawn in blood.

But here he sits on a barstool, impotent king of his own right-wing castle, without even the dignity of arrest or martyrdom. A month ago, in less desperate times, the Leader was the cause celebre or the international right-wing set. One day, he answered the phone in his office, spoke for a minute in Afrikaans, then, cupping his hand over the receiver, asked me, "Who's David Duke? Is he a right-winger?" While Duke, the American white supremacist, sought an audience with Terre Blanche, out of the fax machine spun an invitation from Russian nationalist Vladimir Zhirinovsky: Come, establish your new white homeland in Russia!

But tonight, when the police commissioner—currently dodging investigations of his own complicity in anti-ANC hit squads—appears on the television screen to announce, "We've arrested the brains behind the bombings," the insult is not lost on old Terre Blanche. He bellows back, "The bombings will continue! The Boer will fight! We are heading toward revolution, not toward peace and prosperity!"

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On the day the jailed right-wingers had allegedly planned the greatest explosion in South African history—the five-ton airport bomb—Nelson Mandela took the oath of office. From the reviewing stand at the historic inauguration, the Voortrekker Monument was visible on a distant hill across Pretoria, a towering edifice bearing silent witness. After the ceremony, I went to the monument—the Afrikaner holy of holies, which depicts inside on massive friezes the great trek and the subsequent battles that led those early Afrikaners, the white tribe of Africa, to see themselves as God's chosen people. When I pulled up to the monument, I found it closed, all the doors locked. The grounds were being guarded by a platoon of black soldiers. They had been sleeping in the rough scrub grass at the base of the monument all week. Tomorrow, they said, it would be open for business again.

Terre Blanche was back on his farm, and I'd like to think he was currying his horses, worrying about how to pay the bills, and waiting, always waiting, for the day the police would come to pick him up. Nico Prinsloo remained in prison, and sometime in August—deep winter in South Africa—his trial will start. The police say they have a strong case, but Prinsloo, shaking my hand in the dock at the courthouse on my last day in South Africa, said he was confident. The judge has declared that if they are found guilty, he will show no mercy. But if Prinsloo and his fellow right-wing soldiers are found not guilty, it will be a consequence of the bill of rights that has been enshrined in the new South African constitution, the same constitution that they so violently opposed, at least in word, if not in deed.

And on the first working day of the new South African Parliament, President Mandela conducted business in Afrikaans—the language of his former oppressor, which he had mastered while in prison. And even General Viljoen, now the official leader of the conservative opposition in Parliament, was moved to tears.